→pdf withpassword JB_GT_preface1999.pdf
★Japanese page on Butler's "Gender Trouble" is in gender_trouble.html
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●別ページから | ||
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18 |
Although I've
enumerated some of the academic traditions
and debates that have animated this book, it is not my purpose to
offer a full apologia in these brief pages. There is one aspect of
the conditions of its production that is not always understood
about the text: it was produced not merely from the academy,
but from convergent social movements of which I have been a
part, and within the context of a lesbian and gay community on
the east coast of the United States in which I lived for fourteen
years prior to the writing of this book. Despite the dislocation of
the subject that the text performs, there is a person here: I went
to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of
genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of
them, and encountered sexuality at several of its cultural edges. I
knew many people who were trying to find their way in the
midst of a significant movement for sexual recognition and freedom,
and felt the exhilaration and frustration that goes along
with being a part of that movement both in its hopefulness and
internal dissension. At the same time that I was ensconced in the
academy, I was also living a life outside those walls, and though
GendeTr roublies an academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-
over, sitting on Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could
link the different sides of my life. That I can write in an
autobiographical
mode does not, I think, relocate this subject that I
am, but perhaps it gives the reader a sense of solace that there is
someone here (I will suspend for the moment the problem that
this someone is given in language). |
こ
の本を動かしてきた学術的な伝統や議論のいくつかを列挙してきたが、この短いページで完全な謝罪をすることが私の目的ではない。それは、このテキストが単
に学術的なものではなく、私が参加していた社会運動の中から、また、この本を書く前に14年間住んでいたアメリカ東海岸のレズビアン＆ゲイ・コミュニティ
の中から生み出されたということです。このテキストが行う対象の離散にもかかわらず、ここには人がいる。私は多くのミーティングやバー、デモ行進に参加
し、多くの種類のジェンダーを目にし、それらのいくつかの分岐点に自分がいることを理解し、文化的なエッジのいくつかでセクシュアリティに出会いました。
性の承認と自由を求める重要な運動の中で、自分の道を見つけようとしている多くの人々を知っており、その運動の一部であることに伴う爽快感と挫折感を、希
望に満ちたものと内部の不和の両方で感じました。Gender
Toubles』は学術書ではありますが、私にとっては、レトボス・ビーチに座って、自分の人生のさまざまな側面を結びつけることができるかどうかを考え
るという、渡りに船のようなところから始まりました。自伝的なモードで書けるということは、私という対象を再配置することにはならないと思いますが、おそ
らく読者には、ここに誰かがいるという安心感を与えるのではないでしょうか（この誰かが言語で与えられているという問題は、ひとまず保留にします）。 |
| 19 |
It has been one of
the most gratifying experiences for me that
the text continues to move outside the academy to this day. At
the same time that the book was taken up by Queer Nation,
and some of its reflections on the theatricality of queer
selfpresentation
resonated with the tactics of Act Up, it was among
the materials that also helped to prompt members of the
American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychological
Association to reassess some of their current doxa on
homosexuality. The questions of performative gender were
appropriated in different ways in the visual arts, at Whitney
exhibitions, and at the Otis School for the Arts in Los Angeles,
among others. Some of its formulations on the subject of
"women" and the relation between sexuality and gender also
made its way into feminist jurisprudence and antidiscrimination
legal scholarship in the work of Vicki Schultz, Katherine Franke,
and Mary Jo Frug. |
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| 20 |
In turn, I have
been compelled to revise some of my positions
in GenderT roublbey virtue of my own political engagements. In the
book, I tend to conceive of the claim of "universality" in
exclusive negative and exclusionary terms. However, I came to
see the term has important strategic use precisely as a non -
substantial and open-ended category as I worked with an extraordinary
group of activists first as a board member and then as
board chair of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights
Commission (1994-7) , an organization that represents sexual
minorities on a broad range of human rights issues. There I
came to understand how the assertion of universality can be
proleptic and performative, conjuring a reality that does not yet
exist, and holding out the possibility for a convergence of cultural
horizons that have not yet met. Thus, I arrived at a second
view of universality in which it is defined as a future-oriented
labor of cultural translation. 13 More recently, I have been compelled
to relate my work to political theory and, once again, to
the concept of universality in a co-authored book that I am writing
with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek on the theory of
hegemony and its implications for a theoretically activist Left (to
be published by Verso in 2000). |
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| 21 |
Another practical
dimension of my thinking has taken place in
relationship to psychoanalysis as both a scholarly and clinical
enterprise. I am currently working with a group of progressive
psychoanalytic therapists on a new journal, Studies in Gender and
Sexualityt,h at seeks to bring clinical and scholarly work into
productive
dialogue on questions of sexuality, gender, and culture. |
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| 22 |
Both critics and
friends of GenderT roubleh ave drawn attention
to the difficulty of its style. It is no doubt strange, and maddening
to some, to find a book that is not easily consumed to be
"popular" according to academic standards. The surprise over
this is perhaps attributable to the way we underestimate the
reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated
and challenging texts, when the complication is not gratuitous,
when the challenge is in the service of calling taken-for-granted
truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those
truths is, indeed, oppressive. |
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| 23 |
I think that style
is a complicated terrain, and not one that we
unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously
intend. Fredric Jameson made this clear in his early book on
Sartre. Certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that
become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice.
Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral.
Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation
into normalized language, where the price of not conforming
is the loss of intelligibility itself As Drucilla Cornell, in the
tradition of Adorno, reminds me: there is nothing radical about
common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received
grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given
the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed,
upon the thinkable itself But formulations that twist grammar or
that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of
propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They
produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their
readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are
offended making a legitimate request for "plain speaking" or
does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of
intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from
such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is
naturalized
through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has
argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental
epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting
the grammar in which gender is given. |
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| 24 |
The demand for
lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the
ostensibly "clear" view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in
which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, "let me
make one thing perfectly clear" and then proceeded to lie. What
travels under the sign of "clarity," and what would be the price
of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival
oflucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of "clarity"
and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the
insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for
all communication? What does "transparency" keep obscure? |
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| 25 |
I grew up
understanding something of the violence of gender
norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically anomalous
body, deprived of family and friends, living out his days in an
"institute" in the Kansas prairies; gay cousins forced to leave
their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my
own tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent
adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and homes. All of this subjected
me to strong and scarring condemnation but, luckily, did
not prevent me from pursuing pleasure and insisting on a legitimating
recognition for my sexual life. It was difficult to bring
this violence into view precisely because gender was so taken for
granted at the same time that it was violently policed. It was
assumed either to be a natural manifestation of sex or a cultural
constant that no human agency could hope to revise. I also came
to understand something of the violence of the foreclosed life,
the one that does not get named as "living," the one whose
incarceration implies a suspension of life, or a sustained death
sentence. The dogged effort to "denaturalize" gender in this text
emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative
violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to
uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive
heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses
on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was
not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe
theatrical antics in the place of "real" politics, as some
critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always
distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible,
and to rethink the possible as such. What would the world have
to be like for my uncle to live in the company of family, friends,
or extended kinship of some other kind? How must we rethink
the ideal morphological constraints upon the human such that
those who fail to approximate the norm are not condemned to a
death within life?14 |
解
剖学的に異常な身体のために投獄され、家族や友人を奪われ、カンザスの大草原にある「インスティテューション（＝精神病院）」で日々を過ごしていた叔父、
現実と想像の両方のセクシュアリ
ティのために家を追われたゲイの従兄弟たち、16歳のときの波乱に満ちたカミングアウト、そしてその後の大人になってからの仕事、恋人、家の喪失。このよ
うに、私は強く傷つくような非難を受けましたが、幸いなことに、私が喜びを追求し、自分の性生活を正当に評価することを主張することを妨げませんでした。
このような暴力を目の当たりにするのは困難でしたが、それはジェンダーが当然のものとされていたと同時に、暴力的に取り締まられていたからです。ジェン
ダーは、性の自然な現れか、人間の力では変えられない文化的な恒常性のどちらかだと思われていたのです。また私は、「生きている」と名指しされないもの、
つまり投獄されることで人生の中断、あるいは持続的な死刑宣告を意味する、封じ込められた人生の暴力性についても理解するようになりました。このテキスト
でジェンダーを「非自然化」しようとする執拗な努力は、理想的な性の形態によって暗示される規範的な暴力に対抗したいという強い願望と、セクシュアリティ
に関する普通の言説や学術的な言説によって知らされている、自然な、あるいは推定的な異性愛についての広汎な仮定を根絶したいという願望の両方から生まれ
ていると思う。この非自然化の記述は、一部の批評家が推測したように（まるで演劇と政治が常に区別されているかのように）、単に言葉遊びをしたいとか、
「本当の」政治の代わりに演劇的な振る舞いを規定したいという願望から行われたものではない。それは、生きること、生きることを可能にすること、そして可
能なことを再考することへの欲求から行われたものでした。私の叔父が家族や友人、あるいは他の種類の親族と一緒に暮らすためには、世界はどのようにならな
ければならないのでしょうか？人間の理想的な形態的制約をどのように考え直せばよいのでしょうか。それは、標準に近づけない人々が生の中の死を宣告されな
いようにするためです。 |
|
| 26 |
Some readers have
asked whether GenderT roublsee eks to expand
the realm of gender possibilities for a reason. They ask, for what
purpose are such new configurations of gender devised, and
how ought we to judge among them? The question often
involves a prior premise, namely, that the text does not address
the normative or prescriptive dimension of feminist thought.
"Normative" clearly has at least two meanings in this critical
encounter, since the word is one I use often, mainly to describe
the mundane violence performed by certain kinds of gender
ideals. I usually use "normative" in a way that is synonymous
with "pertaining to the norms that govern gender." But the term
"normative" also pertains to ethical justification, how it is
established,
and what concrete consequences proceed thereform . One
critical question posed of GenderT roubleh as been: how do we proceed
to make judgments on how gender is to be lived on the
basis of the theoretical descriptions offered here? It is not possible
to oppose the "normative" forms of gender without at the
same time subscribing to a certain normative view of how
the gendered world ought to be. I want to suggest, however, that
the positive normative vision of this text, such as it is, does not
and cannot take the form of a prescription: "subvert gender in
the way that I say, and life will be good." |
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| 27 |
Those who make
such prescriptions or who are willing to
decide between subversive and unsubversive expressions of
gender, base their judgments on a description. Gender appears in
this or that form, and then a normative judgment is made about
those appearances and on the basis of what appears. But what
conditions the domain of appearance for gender itself? We may
be tempted to make the following distinction: a descriptivaec count
of gender includes considerations of what makes gender intelligible,
an inquiry into its conditions of possibility, whereas a
normative account seeks to answer the question of which expres sions
of gender are acceptable, and which are not, supplying
persuasive reasons to distinguish between such expressions in
this way. The question, however, of what qualifies as "gender" is
itself already a question that attests to a pervasively normative
operation of power, a fugitive operation of "what will be the
case" under the rubric of "what is the case." Thus, the very
description of the field of gender is in no sense prior to, or
separable from, the question of its normative operation. |
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| 28 |
I am not
interested in delivering judgments on what distinguishes
the subversive from the unsubversive. Not only do I
believe that such judgments cannot be made out of context, but
that they cannot be made in ways that endure through time
("contexts" are themselves posited unities that undergo temporal
change and expose their essential disunity). Just as metaphors
lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into
concepts, so subversive performances always run the risk of becoming
deadening cliches through their repetition and, most
importantly, through their repetition within commodity culture
where "subversion" carries market value. The effort to name the
criterion for subversiveness will always fail, and ought to. So
what is at stake in using the term at all? |
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| 29 |
What continues to
concern me most is the following kinds of
questions: what will and will not constitute an intelligible life,
and how do presumptions about normative gender and sexuality
determine in advance what will qualify as the "human" and the
"livable"? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions
work to delimit the very field of description that we have
for the human? What is the means by which we come to see
this delimiting power, and what are the means by which we
transform it? |
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| 30 |
The discussion of
drag that GenderT roubleo ffers to explain the
constructed and performative dimension of gender is not precisely
an exampleo f subversion. It would be a mistake to take it as
the paradigm of subversive action or, indeed, as a model for
political agency. The point is rather different. If one thinks that
one sees a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a
man, then one takes the first term of each of those perceptions as
the "reality" of gender: the gender that is introduced through
the simile lacks "reality," and is taken to constitute an illusory
appearance. In such perceptions in which an ostensible reality is
coupled with an unreality, we think we know what the reality is,
and take the secondary appearance of gender to be mere artifice,
play, falsehood, and illusion. But what is the sense of "gender
reality" that founds this perception in this way? Perhaps we think
we know what the anatomy of the person is ( sometimes we do
not, and we certainly have not appreciated the variation that
exists at the level of anatomical description) . Or we derive that
knowledge from the clothes that the person wears, or how the
clothes are worn. This is naturalized knowledge, even though it
is based on a series of cultural inferences, some of which are highly
erroneous. Indeed, if we shift the example from drag to
transsexuality, then it is no longer possible to derive a judgment
about stable anatomy from the clothes that cover and articulate
the body. That body may be preoperative, transitional; or
postoperative;
even "seeing" the body may not answer the question:
for whata re the categorieths roughw hicho nes ees?T he moment in which
one's staid and usual cultural perceptions fail, when one cannot
with surety read the body that one sees, is precisely the moment
when one is no longer sure whether the body encountered is
that of a man or a woman. The vacillation between the categories
itself constitutes the experience of the body in question. |
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| 31 |
When such
categories come into question, the reality of gender
is also put into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish
the real from the unreal. And this is the occasion in which we
come to understand that what we take to be "real," what we
invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a
changeable and revisable reality. Call it subversive or call it
something
else. Although this insight does not in itself constitute a
political revolution, no political revolution is possible without a
radical shift in one's notion of the possible and the real. And
sometimes this shift comes as a result of certain kinds of practices
that precede their explicit theorization, and which prompt
a rethinking of our basic categories: what is gender, how is it
produced and reproduced, what are its possibilities? At this
point, the sedimented and reified field of gender "reality" is
understood as one that might be made differently and, indeed,
less violently. |
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| 32 |
The point of this
text is not to celebrate drag as the expression
of a true and model gender ( even as it is important to resist the
belittling of drag that sometimes takes place), but to show that
the naturalized knowledge of gender operates as a preemptive
and violent circumscription of reality. To the extent the gender
norms (ideal dimorphism, heterosexual complementarity of
bodies, ideals and rule of proper and improper masculinity and
femininity, many of which are underwritten by racial codes of
purity and taboos against miscegenation) establish what will and
will not be intelligibly human, what will and will not be considered
to be "real," they establish the ontological field in which
bodies may be given legitimate expression. If there is a positive
normative task in GenderT roublei,t is to insist upon the extension
of this legitimacy to bodies that have been regarded as false,
unreal, and unintelligible. Drag is an example that is meant to
establish that "reality" is not as fixed as we generally assume it to
be. The purpose of the example is to expose the tenuousness of
gender "reality" in order to counter the violence performed by
gender norms. |
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| 33 |
In this text as
elsewhere I have tried to understand what political
agency might be, given that it cannot be isolated from the
dynamics of power from which it is wrought. The iterability of
performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow
power as the condition of its own possibility. This text does not
sufficiently explain performativity in terms of its social, psychic,
corporeal, and temporal dimensions. In some ways, the continuing
work of that clarification, in response to numerous excellent
criticisms, guides most of my subsequent publications. |
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| 34 |
Other concerns
have emerged over this text in the last decade,
and I have sought to answer them through various publications.
On the status of the materiality of the body, I have offered a
reconsideration and revision of my views in Bodiesth at Matter.O n
the question of the necessity of the category of "women" for
feminist analysis, I have revised and expanded my views in
"Contingent Foundations" to be found in the volume I coedited
with Joan W. Scott, FeministTs heorizteh e Political( Routledge, 19 9
3)
and in the collectively authored FeministC ontentions(R outledge,1995). |
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| 35 |
I do not believe
that poststructuralism entails the death of
autobiographical writing, but it does draw attention to the difficulty
of the "I" to express itself through the language that is
available to it. For this "I" that you read is in part a consequence
of the grammar that governs the availability of persons in Ian -
guage. I am not outside the language that structures me, but
neither am I determined by the language that makes this "I"
possible. This is the bind of self-expression, as I understand it.
What it means is that you never receive me apart from the
grammar that establishes my availability to you. If I treat that
grammar as pellucid, then I fail to call attention precisely to that
sphere oflanguage that establishes and disestablishes intelligibility,
and that would be precisely to thwart my own project as I
have described it to you here. I am not trying to be difficult, but
only to draw attention to a difficulty without which no "I" can
appear. |
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| 36 |
This difficulty
takes on a specific dimension when approached
from a psychoanalytic perspective. In my efforts to understand
the opacity of the "I" in language, I have turned increasingly to
psychoanalysis since the publication of GenderT roubleT. he usual
effort to polarize the theory of the psyche from the theory of
power seems to me to be counterproductive, for part of what is
so oppressive about social forms of gender is the psychic difficulties
they produce. I sought to consider the ways in which
Foucault and psychoanalysis might be thought together in The
Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, 1997). I have also made use of
psychoanalysis to curb the occasional voluntarism of my view of
performativity without thereby undermining a more general
theory of agency. GenderT roubleso metimes reads as if gender is
simply a self-invention or that the psychic meaning of a gendered
presentation might be read directly off its surface. Both of
those postulates have had to be refined over time. Moreover, my
theory sometimes waffles between understanding performativity
as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to think
that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so, and that
a reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably
draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic
dimensions. In ExcitableS peechI, sought to show that the speech
act is at once performed ( and thus theatrical, presented to an
audience, subject to interpretation), and linguistic, inducing a
set of effects through its implied relation to linguistic conventions.
If one wonders how a linguistic theory of the speech act
relates to bodily gestures, one need only consider that speech
itself is a bodily act with specific linguistic consequences. Thus
speech belongs exclusively neither to corporeal presentation nor
to language, and its status as word and deed is necessarily
ambiguous. This ambiguity has consequences for the practice of
coming out, for the insurrectionary power of the speech act, for
language as a condition of both bodily seduction and the threat
of injury. |
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| 37 |
If
I were to rewrite this book under present circumstances, I
would include a discussion of transgender and intersexuality,
the way that ideal gender dimorphism works in both sorts of
discourses, the different relations to surgical intervention that
these related concerns sustain. I would also include a discussion
on racialized sexuality and, in particular, how taboos against
miscegenation (and the romanticization of cross-racial sexual
exchange) are essential to the naturalized and denaturalized
forms that gender takes. I continue to hope for a coalition of
sexual minorities that will transcend the simple categories of
identity, that will refuse the erasure of bisexuality, that will
counter and dissipate the violence imposed by restrictive bodily
norms. I would hope that such a coalition would be based on the
irreducible complexity of sexuality and its implication in various
dynamics of discursive and institutional power, and that no one
will be too quick to reduce power to hierarchy and to refuse its
productive political dimensions. Even as I think that gaining
recognition for one's status as a sexual minority is a difficult task
within reigning discourses of law, politics, and language, I
continue to consider it a necessity for survival. The mobilization of
identity categories for the purposes of politicization always
remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an
instrument of the power one opposes. That is no reason not to
use, and be used, by identity. There is no political position purified
of power, and perhaps that impurity is what produces
agency as the potential interruption and reversal of regulatory
regimes. Those who are deemed "unreal" nevertheless lay hold
of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital
instability is produced by that performative surprise. This book
is written then as part of the cultural life of a collective struggle
that has had, and will continue to have, some success in increasing
the possibilities for a livable life for those who live, or try to
live, on the sexual margins. 15
JUDITH BUTLER
BerkeleyC,a lifornia
June, 1999 |
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